Jean-Marie Le Pen in his own words

"I'm not saying the gas chambers didn't exist. I did not see them myself. I have not studied the question, but I think it is a mere detail in the history of the Second World War."

"What do I have to do not to be a racist? Marry a black woman? With Aids if possible?"

"We will not sit by and let our freedom and rights be trampled on because we are not Jews."

"I don't like Chagall and my favourite composer is Wagner. Does that make me anti-Jewish.?"

"Just because immigration is done without weapons doesn't mean it isn't an invasion. If the Nazi Germans had come in 1939 wearing suits and hats it would still have been an invasion."

On the national football team: "It's a bit artificial to bring players in from abroad and call it the French team. The players in other teams sing their national anthem with gusto most players in the French team don't sing La Marseillaise and don't even know it."

"When there is a loaf of bread you give to your own first. As there is no more work it is only right that immigrants should be asked to return home."

Le Pen once suggested that people with Aids, "a deadly disease contracted from sodomy", should be confined to specialised homes called "Aidatoriums".

The French Revolution was "a bloody calamity for the French people. This revolution spawned two dreadful bastards: Nazism and Communism."

On colonialism: "It had a positive influence on the development of the populations that were subject to its authority. Of course, one could argue at length whether these popultions are really happier in jeans and tennis shoes than running barefoot in the wild."

On the Muslim veil, "It protects us from ugly women."

On Joan of Arc: "My favourite statesman."

On Jörg Haider, the Austrian leader of the far-Right Freedom Party: "A brilliant opportunist who used his talents to appropriate Austrian nationalism and thereby gained a big political achievement without deriving any direct benefit from it."

On Lady Thatcher: "I admire her very much. A real man like Golda Meir."